FIC: [Haven] Shattered (Unbreakable #3), part 2. Duke/Nathan (Explicit)

[roseveare]

2. The Lost Week

"Use me," Nathan had gasped to Duke, amid the spiral down from bad to worse. On some level, he knew when he said it how this was going to end. For a period of weeks, with Duke, he'd been allowed to think his existence would be something other than disposable, a tool employed in the service of fixing past wrongs, but he could have guessed that, too, had its end. What little of happiness he'd had, he'd stolen. He didn't deserve it.

"Do you really feel like that?" a female voice asks, piercing the darkness. He opens his eyes to see Anna Benedict standing in front of his -- Dwight's desk. If she knocked on the door, he didn't hear it. Probably she saw him sitting zoned out through the internal windows. Saw, or… sensed. She raises her eyebrows and ducks her chin and he knows what they say about her is true. She can follow every thought that crosses his mind.

She's wearing a mild, noncommittal expression and Nathan doesn't trust her, but he has the feeling worse people have been inside his head, and after everything that has happened, there can't be any secrets left that matter any more.

Since she can find the answer for herself, he ignores the question. "Thank you for coming. I need your help to map out the last... thirteen days. I have incident reports, police records. My own notes... illegible as half of those are for that time. But it should help." Papers cover every available surface in the room. He hasn't just been spacing out since he called her. He pulled the files for everything he was involved with since William strolled into his office on Lexie's arm. Dwight is going to flip. "I need to know how we got to here."

A crease deepens between her eyebrows. Anna Benedict is small and blonde, and her whole appearance and attitude is a contrast to the confident and forthright Claire until you realise the initially demure manner is just another ploy to lower people's defences. She clearly thinks Nathan's lost it. "You know you were there, Nathan."

In the circumstances, her familiarity doesn't feel odd. This might be the strangest conversation he's had in a while.

"I--" The phone starts to ring on Dwight's desk. Nathan tries to ignore it. Pinches his nose and shuts his eyes. Then he goes and pulls the cord out of the wall. "I was clinically dead. Possibility of brain damage. Oxygen starvation. Memory loss. The day before yesterday is definitely hazy. But is that all? I need to find out for sure. You--" He realises he's wielding the cord he's just pulled at her, and drops his arm to his side. "You help me. That's what you do."

"Technically," she says, "I help the Troubled."

She is almost certainly Guard, and one of the few with brain enough not to barcode themselves with it. But she doesn't move to leave, so he decides to ignore that as just a mean barb.

"I need to retrace the steps that led to my death." He gulps for air that's suddenly lacking, and has to remind himself that he definitely took the anti-inflammation pills not an hour ago.

"How dramatic. So, do you want my professional help, or is it other, more 'specialised' skills you might be aware of? You have every right to the former, though you've never heeded any suggestions to book a session with me before. I'd call it presumptuous to request the latter."

"I think it was a murder, and I'm not talking about Duke. I need to..." He gestures frustratedly. "To unravel this any way I can. Any way you can."

As he goes to the first of the piles he's laid out, he hears other papers rustle in time with the pages in his hands, and by the time he turns around she's seated, legs crossed, in the guest chair. A large format notebook rests upon her knee. She gives him a slow nod. "Please sit down," she tells him, professionalism taking over from her former rancour. "You were badly injured, it's been less than forty-eight hours... It's irritating when patients pass out mid-session."

"I don't want to be a patient," Nathan objects. "I just need to know." He takes the paperwork over to the chief's desk and sits down. He does wonder if Benedict would be humouring him if he wasn't armed with the appearance of authority. "I'm hoping, specifically, that you can spot any anomalies. Figure out if my memory isn't working right, or my mind wasn't."

He's aware that he doesn't sound particularly sane right now, and she is not the ideal person to be displaying any break in sanity to. The papers feel sharp edged in his hands as he rearranges them on the desk top.

"I could read people's thoughts when I was six," she volunteers carefully. "It left me mute for a year, but imbued an urge to understand the human brain that changed my childhood reading to Jung and Freud and psychology textbooks. By the time the Troubles came back, I had spent my entire life preparing for this. In a very real way, you could say I let my Trouble define me. Don't think that gives you a free pass, but… You don't need to be afraid of me. For any of the reasons you're thinking." She hikes her chair closer and picks up and turns a few of the papers on Dwight's desk, scanning the contents.

Nathan rattles impatiently in Dwight's seat. "Alright."

"If we're comfortable..."

Nathan thinks that comfortable is something he'll never be again. Feeling nothing wasn't comfort, exactly, but feeling everything is too much, and the constant, unremitting assault of it while trying to merely sit still is one of the things that could wear him into quiet madness by itself.

"Mr Wuornos, please," Benedict rubs her head with her fingers as though it aches. "I need you to calm down if we're going to get any usable information. But let's start with talking and see if that helps. Tell me about last Wednesday, since that seems to be the earliest report we have here. I'll try to ride along."

***

Lexie brought William to the station mid-morning. She'd been meant to be in at nine, but that wasn't exactly unusual. She hadn't the same work ethic or sense of responsibility Audrey did, although Nathan was learning he could trust her every bit as much in a crisis. Today, unusually, there was a lightness in her steps that hadn't been there since... since it had been Audrey who animated her same frame, way back almost a year ago when she'd first come to Haven.

"This is William," she told them, stepping aside to point two ring-bedecked hands at the man walking in behind her, her face open and excited. "He's the guy who helped me get out of the Barn."

Nathan's hatred of William was an instant, animal force. His freakish cheer and wide grin, his blue eyes which were not exactly like Nathan's but not so far removed, and there was something about the guy which Nathan instantly distrusted.

"What happened then?" Anna Benedict asks, intruding into Nathan's memory.

"There were a lot of questions. The guy came out of a supernatural Barn. Could've been like Howard, not really human -- Howard disintegrated like the Barn did when I shot him, like something from a science fiction movie. Or he could've been like Lexie, immune to the Troubles."

"And?" It's just possible to detect her undercurrent of sourness at the subject of Agent Howard and the destroyed Barn.

"I could feel him. He was like Audrey... like Lexie. But he claimed not to remember why he'd been in the Barn. Claimed not to remember anything at all..."

"...I think it's the easiest excuse invented," Nathan said, scowling at Dwight and Duke, in Dwight's office, as the past rolled out in Technicolor around him again. "Lose his memory and he doesn't have to tell us anything."

In this picture, far clearer than he remembered it before, constructed with the clarity of Benedict's more objective gaze, they are both rolling their eyes a little bit. It went unnoticed by him at the time. Nathan distrusted William, and it's obvious in retrospect that his reasons for that were entrenched in jealousy because Lexie was so clearly into him. Dwight and Duke weren't hanging on his every word and key observations about William the Sleaze, they were passing each other knowing looks. Dwight's contained a trace of sympathy -- Duke's, on closer examination, contained well hidden pain.

"Shit."

"He's your beau," Benedict says. Her voice echoes strangely as it intrudes upon the scene, the wrong shape and sound for the memory. Nathan is half aware of the real world, of the present and of careful fingers touching his wrist like an anchor as he wavers in the disorienting double vision of talking to her simultaneous to revisitng this. He feels the hard seat under his ass and knows he's sitting at Dwight's desk. "Shouldn't it be obvious he's not going to take it well when you pull the possessive act over other women?"

"It's not women, it's Aud-- Lexie. It's complicated--" There's a certain gratuitous humour in the way she dumps him back in the memory and leaves him to squirm, watching himself.

Fast-forward a half hour and they were back with William in the main room of the police station, talking about two guys who were targeting the Troubled. Making Troubles worse, mutating them into something else. Jordan arrived and they discussed how best to get the information out via the Guard and make sure the Troubled knew to watch their backs, made plans for handling any further Troubles that went viral like the dreams.

"I think I know those guys you're looking for," William said. "The short one with curly hair and glasses, and the really big one. They grabbed me when I first escaped from the Barn, but I got away from them. That's why it... took me so long to find you." He said that last part to just Lexie, tweaking her bare arm with the back of his hand and giving her a smarmy, smitten grin. "I guess."

In the memory, slowed down and far more dispassionate than living the moment, Nathan hears the mistake, the pause and the tacked-on recovery that could have exposed him as dishonest so much earlier if only someone had caught it.

...Someone other than Nathan, who it's clear is locked in jealous peevishness, hurting Duke, amusing William, disgusting Jordan and embarrassing Dwight.

"Seeing yourself without the filter isn't comfortable," Benedict puts in, causing him further weird psychic vertigo. "Take note and learn something, Wuornos."

Nathan growls, "William was a dick. That much was obvious from the start. He--"

"You aren't mysteriously better at reading people -- or reading non-human assholes -- than anyone else. This is jealousy and coincidence."

Their review of Wednesday generally sucks for the tatters of Nathan's self-esteem. As the re-lived day draws to an end, they head into more intimate territory. Benedict's commentary begins at, "I've seen it all before... Maybe not two guys, but whatever," but changes fast to, "I hope we're watching this because something important happens and not just to get your jollies."

Nathan isn't getting anything jolly from re-living it with a hostile audience. He doesn't feel this Duke's weight on him and inside him, but he feels heat in his face and knows he's blushing furiously, elsewhere. "It's the last time we were completely normal."

"This is normal?"

"Yes! ...More or less." It's true that Duke may have been indulging Nathan on this evening more than others, since they dialled things back. In retrospect, Duke may have been feeling insecure enough to want to prove something to Nathan, after watching the performance between him and Lexie and William, that day. "But something happened after this, and I don't know when." He realises he can't do this. She's a young woman and he's... fucked up, and this is going to be fucked up, and they've barely even started. If she witnesses it through his skin then it won't hurt, but it's still nothing she deserves to witness.

"Nathan," she berates, receiving the thought and intent before he can speak. In the world of reality, a million miles away, she folds both her hands over his on top of the papers in the middle of the desk between them. "I am not running away. Do not pull that overprotective bullshit on me. I can do things to the inside of your head you can't imagine. Psychiatry is sex. Deal with it."

"It's going to get bad before the end. Especially toward the end," Nathan rasps. They've come out of the memories far enough that he can hear his real voice saying the words, scarred and damaged by Duke's hands. It's still clear and crisp inside his head.

"Stay there." He feels her hands leave his. Before yesterday, he wouldn't have known, sight-unseen. He sits in the grip of whatever trance she's imposed on him and hears her shuffle papers. The shuffling comes closer again. Her touch returns to his hands. "Maybe we should try Thursday..."

***

It started the day after William's appearance, with one of the nastiest Troubles they'd encountered. Daisy Morello's harmless ability to create fairies out of children's imaginations, little delicate-winged fantasies that flitted around, sparkled and vanished, instead started bringing to life a nightmare parade of monsters and maniacs from popular culture.

Zombies and demons, Freddie Kruegar and Jason... the dementors were probably the worst, though Duke had to be funny and claim Jar Jar Binks, and that Stephen King clown was no joke, either. They had to get near to Daisy to stop it, and they couldn't get to Daisy without fighting their way through the horrors surrounding her. As they'd done with the killer golems of Martin Skovann, Duke and Nathan had no choice but to combine Nathan's blood and Duke's Trouble. It wasn't as though repeated nicks and cuts damaged Nathan's ability to fight.

There'd been an offended cast to William's startled expression, watching them fight, that Nathan hadn't understood until later.

He was pretty sure that was the night Lexie and William started sleeping together.

After all the blood spilled during the day, Nathan and Duke returned to the Cape Rouge worn out and jumping at shadows. Nathan was never going to be able to watch Nightmare on Elm Street again, and they'd both definitely sworn off Harry Potter. The tension was weird and they probably should have watched a movie -- say 'My Little Pony' -- and gone to bed, instead of trying to fuck at all.

Nathan didn't even realise what Duke had done until it was over. When they disengaged and Duke averted his head, Nathan followed him around and saw the blood on his shirt collar.

"What happened? Did I elbow you?" He was dismayed by the idea he'd nailed Duke in the nose, as banged up as they both already were.

Duke shook his head, eyes squeezed shut, and dashed from the room. While the sound of running water trickled from the bathroom to Nathan's ears, he went to the mirror and discovered the bite mark on his shoulder.

Duke returned shamefaced, without his shirt. "I got overexcited and -- Jesus, I can't believe I... Didn't you notice me being rougher? You could've yelled me off or something."

But the rough sex had been exactly what Nathan needed after the day he'd had, and at the time all he'd thought was how they'd been unusually attuned. They'd tried and mostly managed to back off from such destructive patterns, of late, but the yearning was full-force in him again.

Things were weird the day after, but it was a predictable weird. William was around again, looking at Nathan with a fixity like he was trying to freak him out. William with his hands all over Lexie, and her all over him. She straddled him on a chair in Nathan's office. They were like teenagers, and William was making himself a Haven PD auxiliary, when he definitely didn't belong there.

"Like you're one to talk," Lexie retorted, when he lost his temper and said too much. "You're always here with Duke. Does this place look like a bar to you? William's the same as me. He understands the Troubles. You're the one who's redundant, you and Duke. Screw you, Nathan."

It had not been a good day at the office. Nathan went home to Duke, and they didn't go to the Rouge, but went back to Nathan's house, where they tried to watch sports on the big TV and didn't have sex. Duke claimed he was too sore now all the aches from the fighting the day before had stiffened.

In retrospect, Nathan understands that Duke was afraid. In truth, it wasn't unclear back then. It just got buried, lost among so much else.

Friday started with the pterodactyl attacks, or rather for Nathan, it started with William ringing his cellphone at 5AM to cheerfully alert him of the pterodactyl attacks with the statement, "Holy flying death, Batman." Dwight apologised later, swearing the guy had seemed perfectly level and helpful when he'd made the offer to call Nathan and Duke in.

William had been around at five in the morning to catch the start of the pterodactyl incident because he and Lexie hadn't gone to bed yet.

There followed more of Nathan's blood, more of Duke's sweat and bruises. They didn't know where the dinosaurs came from, and to date they still don't know, but it's possible that whoever's Trouble it was found their own way to get a grip on it. At the time, the dinosaurs just meant more fighting -- another problem with no other solution but battling through.

When Duke curled against him later in bed, breathing him in, only belatedly did Nathan realise he was burying his nose into the bloody bandaging, sniffing like even the scent enticed him. "God, get me off you," Duke entreated as Nathan's sharp intake of breath made him check himself. Nathan didn't have to shove him away, he scooted off of his own accord.

They slept separately. Nathan went home.

William made jokes about ructions between them when they arrived separately, each in their own truck, the next day.

Saturday was... more dinosaurs, more blood, and a contingent of the Glendower women turned up at the police station, concerned that the Glendower men had disappeared from their regular swimming grounds.

Dwight talked to the Glendowers. Nathan and Duke got to go dinosaur hunting with William and Lexie again. It was like some really annoying double dating arrangement, except with a lot more firepower.

The next day threw at them a minor but deadly Trouble so unstoppable between its affected family members that Duke had no option but to kill. He sobbed into Nathan's shoulder that night and begged for his blood. The cuts were finally starting to get a chance to heal, but wouldn't be difficult to re-open. Nathan said, "No," while secretly wanting the rush of Duke, empowered, pounding him into the mattress. "You know it won't help. It will only make things harder, when it happens next time."

"I'll fuck you hard," Duke promised. Psychosomatic chills washed over Nathan. It was deeply unsettling how Duke's fingers clung onto him and his eyes burned with need. He looked like Wade had, insane and filled with the addictive thrill of butchery when he'd had Nathan chained up in the shower. Duke had used his Trouble much, much more than Wade ever had by now.

With a groan, Duke abruptly turned over, showing Nathan his back. He stayed that way, and eventually fell asleep. Nathan lay in bed most of the night with his eyes open. He couldn't deal with this.

Since he came back to Haven, being with Duke had been all that held him together. If Duke needed blood, maybe next time it would be easiest to give it to him. They'd be able to make love again, and everything would be all right.

By the morning, sanity had reasserted itself. He knew he needed to press for caution next time anyone suggested using Duke to end a Trouble or to fight something monstrous. He absolutely could not offer up his blood to Duke recreationally. Nathan felt so thinly stretched out he could have been turning transparent, and it wouldn't have surprised him, except he was Troubled already.

On Monday morning, the first Glendower leavings washed up on a beach to the west of town. Nathan and Lexie were woken up with the dawn to greet it, leaving both their partners behind at boat and bar.

"How's Duke?" Lexie asked, over the picked-clean top half of a human torso. The lower half still had enough meat on it to be recognisable as a very recent corpse. The problem appeared to have been getting the unfortunate male victim out of his jeans, heavy denim tight and clinging in the water.

It was obvious, in Lexie's amenability and dark-smudged eyes yet distinctly cheerful manner, that while Nathan was getting no sex lately, she was getting plenty. Nathan failed to take the offered olive branch in good spirits. "He's still down from the other day."

Later that day, they had their first sight of what the Glendower men had become. In shock at the pale, sagging white-grey flesh, the teeth, the animal ferocity in once-human eyes, they forgot that it reverted to a person, and forgot, too, that Duke needed to kill it in order for it to be a sacrifice to stop the rest of the horror. Lexie's and Nathan's bullets were too keen, at the cost of at least three more people and half a dozen family pets since. No wonder William grinned from ear to ear as he said, "Wow, you guys bagged a sea monster!"

Lexie explained, putting two and two together. Mathematics mostly based upon the fact the 'sea monster' was wearing a human wetsuit. Duke hung in the background, looking sick and relieved but also a bit like he'd been cheated of his fix.

Nathan put an arm around his shoulders and led him firmly away.

The next day, they woke up and things were different. The floodgates opened. They both realised how much they'd been denying each other. They fucked like it had been a year and not four days. Nathan gasped out those damned words, "Use me," and they groped and scratched one another like animals. Nathan drew blood to make Duke draw it in retaliation, wanting the buzz from the punishment only Duke could give, powered up by his curse.

Here. Something's different, says a voice in Nathan's head, distinct from the memories, though he barely recognises or registers it in the moment. He's lost, caught up in violent sex and silver eyes, the thunk as he's slung back against the mattress, Duke hissing insults at him for denying him so long.

In their bed, seven days ago, despite all their knowledge, caution and experience -- despite Wade -- they started to tear at each other without inhibition, as though there was anything to be gained from it other than mutual destruction.

It got lost because that was the day, a week into the escalation of all their problems, when they discovered it had been William behind everything all along.

Lexie protested, denied, cried impossibility and claimed to have been with him for at least two occasions when people had been attacked and their Troubles activated, accelerated, mutated. But William could do things, and it had become obvious enough to the rest of them that he didn't need to be there in person to cause those things to happen.

William fled. Lexie got angry, got drunk, got into a fight with Dwight that was scarily brutal. Duke and Nathan lost themselves in stolen moments of illicit thrill. A tack slid covertly into Nathan's jaw as they stood by the notice board in his office, and Duke's silver eyes turned in toward the wall for the rough kiss that followed. A fingernail scraped across a healing scab beneath Nathan's shirt while they leaned against the side of the Bronco, in full public view in the street. Duke closed his eyes to hide them.

Bruised and angry already from Lexie, Dwight lost his temper with them both for being so absorbed in each other while their friend's world fell apart. He failed to see the blood, the need, the obsession. Couldn't see the doom hanging over them yet.

That night was no-holds-barred, no sanity permitted into proceedings, all the things they'd been too cautious to do, testing Duke's stamina while under the influence. It didn't bother Nathan to bleed. He could do it all day. The rewards were more than worth it.

The next day, everyone in the Holdsworth family started to eat themselves, starting from the extremities inward. Duke had to kill Amelia Holdsworth to stop it.

"The buzz from killing is stronger," Duke confided, nuzzling Nathan's neck and a cut, supposedly from shaving, that had actually just been planning ahead for later. "Better." He smeared lines of Nathan's blood down his fingers, and they both watched it sink in. "I hate the idea of killing people feeling so good."

"Well, you won't get to feel this every night in your bed if you kill me," Nathan responded. "That would be a one-time high." He mostly felt annoyed because wizened old Amelia Holdsworth just outdid him in Duke's eyes. He didn't feel sickened that Duke had just killed an old woman whose last few hours had been utterly horrific, and that the rest of her family, no longer afflicted but already varyingly mutilated, were still left to suffer the consequences because they had not made the decision to kill faster.

Troubles came thick and fast. Nathan spent the night getting fucked so hard Dwight noticed him limping the next day -- unable to feel, but still limping -- and asked if he was all right. Nathan gave back unfriendly answers for his interest, not willing to hear any suggestion he was doing wrong. Duke needed him, Haven needed him. They needed his blood and Duke's Trouble to keep the rest of the Troubles at bay.

Especially if Lexie was drinking herself into a coma in the apartment above the Gull and refusing to report in.

William laughed at them when they tracked him down. Bloody from a blow of Duke's curse-enhanced fist, he still turned around and laughed, spitting and wiping his nose off on the back of his hand. "Well, if it isn't the Cheeky Boys," he said. "How's that arrangement going, huh? Duke? Nate? Nate? Looking pale there. Perhaps you need a top-up on the old O-negative."

He escaped into the woods. Duke, breathing harshly as they slowed down from his chase, asked, "What did he mean? I'm not hurting you. It's only scratches. I can barely get enough to make the buzz last from those."

Later, Nathan sliced deeper lines into his chest to prove himself.

Dwight figured it out. Or it might've been Jordan who figured it out and told Dwight, who responded by trying to take them off the case -- off any cases going. But Troubles were relentless, and in the end, no-one had a choice.

Lexie disappeared. They'd coaxed her out of the apartment only a few times since William's betrayal. Now, it really was all down to them. Through Anna Benedict's crystal-sharp re-imagining of Nathan's memories, their last days rolled out a shameful picture. Time lost meaning. Events lost coherence. Everything became sex and blood and blunt force. Things started to become... not so good, even for Nathan in that state of mind, because Duke's descent was faster, with more pulling him down.

Until Duke couldn't hold off anymore, tossed Nathan aside and charged out in the middle of the night to hunt Glendowers, because he needed the buzz of the kill that Nathan couldn't provide him... Or at least, could only provide once.

And Nathan, ridiculously, chose to follow.

***

He comes out of the memory gasping and shivering anew from the transition into sensation from nothing. Anna Benedict grips his hands and urges him toward calm. There are means she is employing that don't use her hands or her voice, but she is trembling, too, eyes wide and shocked. The last encounter was brutal. He can feel her shivers through her hands.

Nathan doesn't know why he went after Duke; whether it was the urge to prevent him killing someone else or jealous rage that Duke could look elsewhere for his needs. No clear thinking was being done at that point.

But what is clear is that Duke went out that night looking for a Troubled person to kill, and if it hadn't been Nathan, it might have been a Glendower, but it also might have been someone else. Someone whose Trouble was not dangerous, who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"You don't come back from that," Nathan says, staring Benedict in the eye. Both their shaking is starting to calm down. "You don't just come back." Duke is sane now. It can't have been the shock of killing Nathan that snapped him out of it: this isn't a fairy tale. "It can't just have been the blood. He'd still be raving."

They stare at each other. Benedict knows as much now as he does. She doesn't say anything, but she doesn't refute it.

"I need to go back," Nathan says, tightening his hands on her hands. The grip is sweaty and full of small tremors, he has no idea whose. Her reluctance tells in the way she takes her hands back from him to fold across her chest. "There's something else there. In those last moments. Something I'm missing. We changed..."

Nathan is also much saner now than he was. He is as sure as he can be that you don't lose yourself that hard only to spring back like sanity operates on a bungee cord. He knows. He's been there before... to a lesser degree.

"I need to see it again," he tells Benedict, and has the grace, this time, to put a trace of request in there, of apology. This is not just a trauma for him. Even if that last round with Duke had not been so close to something else, she just felt him die.

"Are you kidding? Every Troubled person in Haven has daydreams about that." The tremble in her voice gives the lie to the bravado.

Nathan still thinks that putting her through this is not one of his shining hours, but he's having so few of those anyway lately. After laying it all out, it's a wonder Dwight and the others welcomed him back as readily as they did. It's no wonder they were ready to drag him out of a hospital bed.

"I suppose the martyr complex is unremarkable in the circumstances," Benedict comments, not too shaken to resist getting one last dig in.

"I need to know." Nathan holds his hands out for hers.

***

Duke was gone. Nathan hadn't been enough for him; not to contain him, nor control him. He'd gone to find the rush of the kill.

Nathan found Duke's truck parked at the top of the beach. The tide was out, breakers a long way off down the sand. He looked around in the fading light for a spot where Duke could have walked and saw distant rocks.

He found Duke kicking the water, agitatedly yelling at the sea. Speckles of rain had begun to fall, and by that time, night was settling over them in a grey shroud.

Seeing him there, Duke breathed in sharply. "Damn it, Nathan, I'm not safe to be around. I told you that. Why don't you ever listen?"

"Well, now. That depends on what you want in a partner, doesn't it?" Nathan was too preoccupied to register Duke's shakes, even though he knew every danger sign there. "Come home, Duke."

"I'll kill you." Stubborn, driven. "I need to find a Glendower. At least that's something I can excuse. Something useful. Dwight wants it done, no matter what he says."

There was a tank full of Glendowers at the aquarium, but they'd be watched by the Guard, and whoever was there might be too tempting a Troubled morsel for Duke in his current state.

"You're not going to kill me," Nathan said. "Better me than anyone else. You can't stay out here all night if a Glendower doesn't come." Half the people he would see first thing in the morning were Troubled. But if Duke was home, and rested, and at least trying to get this out of his system... "You can lock yourself in the store room and meditate again. It worked before. Duke, come on." He took a step forward and Duke backed away from him, almost a desperate lunge. Nathan darted to catch him, fingers curling in the material of his knit pullover.

Duke returned the gesture, grabbing him so hard he couldn't step out of the hold. "Nathan, you do not want to do this, okay? Back off." But Duke... wasn't letting go.

Nathan forged ahead with what had always worked. He wasn't afraid of rough sex. He wasn't afraid of Duke killing him, even if it would do nothing to take away the Troubles, even if he knew that Duke wouldn't survive killing Nathan. At the time, it didn't feel like he was embracing destruction. He closed his mouth over Duke's and kissed him.

Duke shoved him backwards hard. Then they were on the ground. Gravel crunched beneath Nathan, and Duke shifted and squirmed, pulling his clothes to get at broken skin. The cloth clung, damp with the drizzle and the spray, resisting Duke until it tore, revealing lines of old cuts. Nathan healed fast, but there were plenty of marks still fresh enough to break open.

Duke drew out his father's knife. Even in the replay, Nathan couldn't remember when in the past weeks Duke had stopped trying to ignore its existence and begun to carry it, but he knew that Duke had. The blade slashed down, creating a new line of red.

"Is it better when it's fresh?" Nathan asked, curiously detached.

"It's better with the act of cutting it free." Duke held up the knife, then pressed the blade to his own cheek. He didn't cut himself. The blood smeared off the blade onto his face and sank in. His eyes silvered and he sighed.

"Let's go home," Nathan said. It was cold and wet, and he couldn't feel that but Duke could. Besides, the lube was at home, the bed was at home. There was a lot more they could do on the Rouge than out here.

Duke shook his head. "Let's stay here." He turned the knife to smear the reverse of the blade and used the increased strength to stop Nathan as he tried to get up, catching both wrists and pulling them over to one side, pinning them up by his shoulder. Duke leaned all his weight forward to keep them there when the blood-rush wore down.

"Duke!" Nathan shouted at him, starting to get angry.

Duke reached down with the knife and popped the button from Nathan's jeans with the tip. Then he leaned in and licked his tongue across the newest cut on Nathan's chest, end to end. His eyes silvered again.

Someone built like Dwight might've been able to hold Nathan down that way indefinitely, but Duke didn't have enough mass on him, and this time, the moment the silver in Duke's eyes cleared, Nathan made a focused effort to wrench loose.

A fist rebounded off the side of his head with a dull smack. The angle wasn't good, and Duke was only able to employ limited force, but surprise caused Nathan to freeze.

"Sorry," Duke panted. There was something in his strained face that was somehow not violent or angry but pathetic, more lost-child than brutal aggressor. "You followed me. I need you really badly, Nathan. Please..." His hands made scuffling noises, out of sight lower down their bodies. The scuffles were followed by the heavier sounds of Nathan's jeans being dragged down.

This was a stupid place to have sex. Nathan's head was wedged by rock on either side. The rocks were sharp, Haven's seas were filled with monsters. The tide wouldn't be in until almost dawn, but when it came in, it was unpredictable. Nathan started to roll over. "When we get home."

Duke caught him by the wrist and shoulder and put him back with supernatural strength. A hand pressed to his bleeding chest, immobilizing the top half of his body, while Duke's other hand reached down again to pull at his jeans.

"Duke!" Nathan roared as soon as he gathered the breath. "We need to get back! You need help. We need help!"

"You seem pretty hard for 'Don't', Nate." Duke slid a hand between his legs, where Nathan had no real idea what was going on. The subtle cues he normally relied on in sexual arousal were lost amid all this.

"Duke, get off!" This wasn't happening. They'd talked about this. They'd talked about too far. But a lot of what they'd talked about had been thrown out in the last week or more.

Duke cursed as he skinned his wrist on a protruding rock in their struggle. He touched Nathan's blood again and used the strength to lift him by the underarms. Hampered by his half-mast jeans, Nathan tried to use his feet to stumble along with Duke's dragging, to reduce the physical wear of being hauled about like a sack. He craned his head and saw their destination was a circle of soft, yellow sand that had collected in the mouth of a cave. Duke dropped him onto the sand with a breathless, "Okay, so I take your point about the rocks. This is better."

Nathan rolled over, swearing, but Duke dropped on top of him before he could get purchase to rise in the soft sand. It didn't hurt, but it knocked the breath from him. One of Duke's arms curled around his chest beneath their pressed bodies, finding the cuts again, while the other hauled on his hips.

"I'm always... always holding back with you," Duke whispered next to his ear. "Please, Nate. Just let me. Just once."

Holding back?

Fury washed through Nathan and he snarled, lowering his chin over Duke's pinning arm, to pin it in return. His head wasn't screwed on right, but those words brought all his fears and anger into relief. A challenge he couldn't refuse: that he wasn't good enough for Duke, wasn't strong enough, resilient enough, couldn't take it. In that moment, at least, it seemed to make sense, transforming the situation from something else into a dare. He clamped his arm over Duke's, pushed back with his hips... hadn't a clue if Duke was already inside him. "You... don't… hold back. I'm built to take it! I keep telling you. Don't hold back."

Another Duke would have called bullshit on him; "Just because you can't feel it, Nate...", the old familiar lecture. But this Duke was way beyond that. The forward slap of his hips formed his reply, and he was rough enough that even Nathan knew each and every thrust was happening. "God, Nate. Nate..." Duke slashed the knife again, opening up a fresh blood source somewhere.

Even at the time, immune to pain, tangled up in inappropriate arousal, and never in his right mind to begin with, Nathan perceived that it went badly after that. His body was not going to be okay afterward.

It began to seep in to him that Duke was genuinely out of control and maybe wasn't coming back. Trying to reassert some measure of sense and restraint in a brown eyed moment got his head slapped sharply... explanation for one mystery laceration he'd woken up with. When he tried to snag Duke's eyes after that he saw only silver, not the real warm, brown gaze he knew.

The world disappeared into the whims of Duke's madness and need.

Nathan wondered if his own arousal would continue to sing even as Duke killed him. The skin of his chest was slick with blood, and there were bite marks on his shoulders... Duke's skin was clean except for damp-stuck sand, absorbing all else that clung to him.

Nathan remembered how Wade, before, had not been interested in Nathan, only his blood. He was more than that to Duke.

It was going to help this time.

The thing inside him that embraced all this was fast becoming drowned out by the will to survive that had survived Wade, that wanted to live and keep living... Something Duke was a part of, though their possibilities of a future seemed to diminish with each twist of a limb and each new penetration as Nathan finally started to fight in earnest. Sand got in his eyes from being shoved face down, and the world blurred into watery streaks. He yelled, trying to bring Duke back to himself, Duke's name over and over... But Duke was oblivious to all but blood and sex. Nathan lost focus and breath as Duke grew impatient with him, knowing what would most inconvenience even if it wouldn't hurt. Nathan choked useless curses. There was no gain in shouting for help... Even if there was anyone close, they'd only be faced by the Crocker Legacy if he brought them closer.

Duke pulled him over onto his back again some incalculable length of time later. "Duke, stop," Nathan grunted, as an elbow wove under his knee. He realised his hands were free and he hadn't even noticed, it had become so much beside the point. He clasped them around Duke's face and managed to jerk his head up and fix Duke's line of sight. "Stop."

He didn't expect it to work.

But Duke's eyes cleared suddenly. Nathan saw the madness dissipate... and saw the horror of being sane again, Duke's realisation of what the hell have I done? He tried hard to recapture enough of his own breath and reason to muster something to soothe and comfort the Duke that had come back.

Before he could, Duke, with the sanity in his eyes crystallizing into determination, put his hands to Nathan's throat, over Nathan's mouth.

Bore down with his weight until the world stopped...

...Picked up...

...Resumed in a blaze of pain.

***

Nathan crashes off his chair with a cry. He shouldn't be startled by the pain... It's still the same pain, two days on, dulled and quieted by artificial means. But numbness is pervasive. He fell into the memory of his numbness, the habit of it.

"You're not there anymore," Anna Benedict's complexion has turned paper-white, but she negotiates chair and table legs to crawl in and touch his wrist. "You're here, in the chief's office. It's a safe place. Duke Crocker is at the Grey Gull."

He's not afraid of Duke. It's just--

The control of his body that Duke took from him, exercised, maintained for hours. It didn't hurt, but he became a puppet dangling at someone else's whim. He couldn't fight.

The shadow of that is still with him.

"Duke was sane when he killed me."

"He was." Anna's eyes are very hard.

"You don't understand..." After the things he'd been forced to do, driven by his curse... In Duke's mind, maybe... maybe he'd had to ensure it could never happen again. So he took Nathan's Trouble away to save him. By every reasonable prediction, save for the most outrageous of luck, he ought to have killed him in the process of trying.

"It doesn't make it better. It was calculated. He knew what he was doing. You should be angry."

Nathan laughs quite a lot.

Oh, he is angry about that. But in the scheme of things, considering what they did to each other, considering how they drove and distorted each other, is it really the most important thing to fixate on? They are both alive. Sane, even... after a fashion. They shouldn't be.

They're saner now than they were for most of the last week, and they shouldn't be.

Anna hisses, "What do you think happened, then? Was this another Trouble?"

Was it?

Nathan climbs back up onto the chair, leaning heavily on the table, and too reliant on Benedict's aid to get that far. He thought she didn't like him, but he supposes those feelings might be harder to hold onto after sharing that.

He leans his head into his hands, bracing elbows on the table, burying his face. "I need to see it again. The last part."

She says, "Fuck you." There's white around the edges of her eyes. "I am not diving back into that."

"Just the last part."

"...Just the part where you jump from absolute zero to a ten on the pain scale? The fun part? No. Above and fucking beyond, Wuornos."

He sighs.

She's on the way to grab her bag and march out of there, from what Nathan can see of her through his fingers, when she stops. "You saw something." Hesitation in her voice. "What did you see?" She comes back to him. Her hands peel his away from his face, and she touches his forehead, slides her thumbs over his eyes, teasing them closed. She tells him, "It's your memory. There is no brain damage. You can remember. You don't need me to take you back there."

She may be right. His mind is... a mess, a morass of pitfalls and traps, but it's not the impossible disorder that it was before she helped strip down and lay out the last two weeks.

"What did you see?" she asks.

Nathan casts himself back. "I saw Duke..."

One moment a maniac with silvered eyes, twisted by addiction and base instinct. The next moment, Duke again. Not making a whole lot of sense, perhaps. Doing stupid, stupid things that Nathan has yet to learn to accept. But still Duke. In between those moments...

"It was dark," Nathan murmurs. He can't be sure what he saw.

But he sees it now, replaying in his memory. A small, round blob of shadow, edges well-defined, too perfect in shape to be an artefact of his blurred, sandy vision or an illusion, detaching itself from Duke's larger shadow and... floating away.

Nathan hisses air out through his teeth.

Benedict waits on his explanation.

"William has... these black balls of crap. Little, smooth, black spheres, about so big." He makes a circle for her with his thumb and forefinger, forgetting she has seen them in his memories. "He uses them to make Troubles. I've seen him do it. I've seen him form a creature out of them, and those two henchmen of his..."

He takes a deep breath. That thing was inside Duke? Is that really what he's saying? Does that mean he had one? Does he still have one? No... no, he is saner now, since dying. But if William could do that, William could make them do anything.

"I think he might use them for other things, too," Nathan rasps, and Benedict's face twists in disgust, catching the picture from his mind. "What do... what do you think?"

Because she's the expert on what minds do. On the sane and the insane. On what's real and what's outside influence. He didn't hesitate long and hard before letting her into his head for nothing.

"I think this fucker William needs to go down," she says, with a vehemence that states whatever claims she makes, she did not appreciate experiencing William's handiwork upon Nathan.

Confirmation is as terrifying as it is reassuring. They had William in their heads, but at least they didn't do this to themselves.

...Did they? It seems to him they were already on the edge of falling apart before William provided the extra push.

Yet they didn't, and Nathan clings to that.

The door bursts open. It's Dwight, demanding to know why the hell Nathan's been ignoring his phone, what the hell he thinks he's been doing with the responsibilities Dwight entrusted to him, and -- what the fuck has he done to his office? Nathan holds up his arms in admission of culpability, too dazed to even attempt explanation on the receiving end of the furious deluge. Benedict pulls Dwight aside to talk.

Whatever of his secrets she's spilling, Nathan's head is spinning too much for him to care.

It's all so fresh and immediate now. The memory-dulling effect of the influence they were under -- of trauma, of resuscitation, of whichever of the multiple options was actually behind his haziness of recollection before...

...It may have had its benefits.

***